Letters: Peace prize reduced to a popularity contest

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WASHINGTON – OCTOBER 09: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on being awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize October 9, 2009 in Washington, DC. The Nobel Committee in Oslo announced the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Nobel Prize had at one time a special aura of greatness and inspired respect, awe and admiration. The Nobel Prize winners in many categories over several decades have made it as special as winning a popularity content at grade school.

The tarnished value of this award is best exemplified by the partial list of previous winners such as anti-Semite Jimmy Carter, life-long terrorist Yasser Arafat, and climate alarmist Al Gore. Now comes the anointed one – Barack Obama to be added to this list of meaningless winners. Can anyone point to any acts or accomplishments that would make him worthy of this recognition? How far does this “hope thing” really go? Talk about all sizzle and no bacon.

Nominations for all Nobel Prize consideration were closed barely 10 days after President Barack Obama took office. It is amazing that the selection committee would consider his body of work done in his short time in office significant enough to recognize him as the savior of world peace. I guess the committee must have also been caught up in the “change mantra.”

I doubt that he had recovered enough from all the inauguration festivities to have had enough time to bring about world peace. I am sure that the “O-zombies” will blame the racist vast, right-wing conspiracy on the fact that their god did this in 10 days while God created the world in seven with a rest day thrown in.

Hugo Folli

San Clemente

Cool the partisan attacks

It seems that anything that Obama does or receives is ripe for the right wing of the Republican Party to snipe at. Now Obama has received the Nobel Prize. Although he admits that he didn’t deserve it, the right continues to attack undeservingly.

Instead of focusing on the health care issue, they will trounce on Obama on this issue. The cavalier way the insurance companies are defining the health care should be the subject of the right’s venom. Thousands of people will die needlessly this year because of no or inadequate health insurance. The right wing touts how religious they are, but how can they call themselves Christian when they are willing to let people die without health care? It is imperative that we get health reform now!

Bob Machado

Tustin

Military is more deserving

Our unsung heroes, our military men and women both past and present are the ones who deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. We have seen it go to organizations but never to those who put their lives on the line which all too often has cost them exactly that – their lives. These are the ones who deserve this recognition.

You wonder why military moral is low, maybe, just maybe, it is because we have forgotten that they are the Fathers and Mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and friends of ours who chose to do what the majority of us wouldn’t even consider. Fighting for freedom is a noble cause and without them we wouldn’t live the lives we live today.

Gregg James

Laguna Niguel

Hoping for better criteria

If an athlete was voted Most Valuable Player based only on his potential, the whole sports world would be up-in-arms. But that is just what the Norwegian Nobel Committee did when it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, as during his nine months in office he has precious little tangible accomplishments. There is still war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is still no peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Iran and North Korea still pose a nuclear threat, prisoners are still in Guantanamo Bay, terrorists still threaten our world, climate change legislation is still stalled in the U.S., and relations with Russia are still shaky.

Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize shouldn’t be based on promise but reality, not on hope but on genuine accomplishments.

Kenneth L. Zimmerman

Huntington Beach

Award has no ‘gravitas’

How can we take the Nobel Peace Prize seriously when we see former winners included Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. Now the latest award has been given to Barack Obama. I need to ask – why, what has he done? He was nominated a few weeks after being nominated for president – he must have won because he gave the most speeches in the shortest length of time.

Kathy Courtney

Laguna Niguel

A consolation prize

The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. It was bad enough that former Vice President Al Gore got one for his impersonation of Chicken Little. Now Obama has one for exactly what? Saddling your country with trillions of dollars of new debt? Is this the consolation prize for his Olympic failure in Copenhagen? This is absurd.